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Heights Before Broadway

Lin-Manuel Miranda in Washington Heights,
the neighborhood that inspired his musical, In the
Heights.Credit
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

TO be perfectly clear, Lin-Manuel Miranda did not grow up in Washington Heights, the physical and spiritual setting of his musical “In the Heights,” which opened on Broadway this week. He was raised in Inwood, an area some blocks north with a similar landscape of immigrants, Spanish speakers and urban decay softened by panoramic vistas. Why not stage a musical there?

“Washington Heights is hillier, it’s more climactic, it’s more well known, it’s more iconic,” Mr. Miranda, who wrote the music and stars in the show, said. “And it sings better.” He tried to stretch Inwood — Innnwooood — into a passable tune. No dice.

But Mr. Miranda, 28 and a self-described nerd, did not hang out in the barrio depicted in movies like “Shaft.” Instead he grew up commuting to the elite public Hunter College elementary and high schools on the Upper East Side and making videos on his own. They were pursuits that his parents — Luis Miranda, a community activist turned political consultant, and Dr. Luz Towns-Miranda, a psychologist — supported. The neighborhood kids, he said, “would chill on the corner, and I would see them when I took out the recycling on Fridays.”

He also spent summers with his grandparents in Puerto Rico, where — “sink or swim,” he said — he learned Spanish. At home he was looked after by Edmunda Claudia, a surrogate grandmother who was once his father’s baby sitter. A compulsive gambler, she let Lin-Manuel pull the arm on the illegal slot machines at the bodega. She appears in the show as Abuela Claudia, a beloved local with a scratch-off lottery habit.

The world of “In the Heights,” which had its debut Off Broadway last year, is like that: an amalgam of personal detail and creative license, grounded in an environment that is as much pan-immigrant as it is pan-Latino, a familiar American dream set to a salsa and hip-hop beat. Ticket sales have been strong.

And so on a recent morning, under a sky threatening and soon delivering rain, Mr. Miranda, dressed down like a high school kid in loose jeans, white sneakers, a hoodie, an army-green jacket and a Nintendo backpack (geek habits die hard), offered a tour of a neighborhood that is half real and half invented. First stop: El Nuevo Caridad, at Broadway and 172nd Street.

Photo

Lin-Manuel Miranda, center, in the musical In the Heights.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“The Caridad is like the McDonald’s of Washington Heights,” Mr. Miranda said as he bantered in Spanish with the women behind the counter. “There’s one every five blocks.” This one was a favorite. He ordered a drink called a morir soñando. “It literally means ‘to die of dreams.’ It’s like the thickest Orange Julius you ever had.”

Slurp! He threw half of his away — too sweet — before continuing.

Mr. Miranda lived uptown for most of his life; after college at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., where he earned a degree with honors in theater studies and began writing “In the Heights,” he shared an apartment at 212th Street and Broadway with two roommates. A rent increase, coupled with his theater schedule, recently drove him downtown, where he lives alone for the first time. But he still spends a lot of time above 170th Street, with his girlfriend, who also attended Hunter and lives in Washington Heights, or his parents, who still live in Inwood.

Before “In the Heights” opened off Broadway, he did a neighborhood tour with the director, Thomas Kail, and the set designer, Anna Louizos; the result is an architecturally rich street scene. (The Broadway set is similar but much grander, Ms. Louizos said. “It’s much more solid. It doesn’t shake.”) And the area still inspires him. When Mr. Miranda was struggling with the show, he would drive through Fort Tryon Park, past a particular craggy rock in the shadow of the Cloisters. “My angsty poetry spot,” he said, “kind of ruined by the M4 going by.”

Next stop: J. Hood Wright Park, on Fort Washington Avenue between 173rd and 176th Streets, where Mr. Miranda was immediately recognized. “We just saw the show,” a woman playing with her child on the jungle gym shouted. “It’s so great to see you up in the ’hood.”

Grinning, Mr. Miranda was quick to say that this kind of thing never happens. Which is kind of hard to believe, considering that he has the same syncopated energy onstage and off. In The New York Times, Charles Isherwood wrote that Mr. Miranda was “music personified,” “commanding the spotlight as if he were born in the wings.”

Well, almost. He grew up studying piano — at 181st Street and Cabrini Boulevard in the Heights — and singing in the school choir. In Hunter’s big sixth-grade show, a three-hour medley, he played Captain Hook, Bernardo from “West Side Story,” Conrad in “Bye Bye Birdie,” a son in “Fiddler on the Roof” and a cowboy in “Oklahoma!” Even then, said Barbara Ames, his elementary-school music teacher, “he was amazingly dramatic and creative and passionate about performing.” (They’ve kept in touch; she has seen “In the Heights” five times.)

After college, Mr. Miranda helped start a hip-hop comedy improv group, Freestyle Love Supreme, in New York. Some members, like Mr. Kail, who directed for F.L.S., are part of “In the Heights”; another F.L.S. founder, Christopher Jackson, plays Benny, the show’s non-Latino suitor. Performing with them clearly honed Mr. Miranda’s sense of timing.

Photo

Lin-Manuel Miranda in his familiar Washington Heights, getting a drink at El Nuevo Caridad.Credit
Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

In the park, he jumped a fence to get a closer look at the George Washington Bridge, which dominates the skyline here and onstage at the Richard Rodgers Theater. When the police drove by on a regular patrol, he got out of there fast. He’s been busted before, for busking with a doo-wop group at the 96th Street subway station in high school. They got caught as they sang Billy Joel’s “Longest Time.”

“We were asking for it,” Mr. Miranda deadpanned.

And on he went. He had hoped to swing by the Hillside Diner, at 181st Street and Fort Washington Avenue, for the neighborhood’s best cup of coffee. (Postcollege, he wrote an article about it for The Manhattan Times, the local newspaper of which his father was a founder.) But like most of the area, the diner was undergoing an upscale shift. “Coming Soon — Hudson View Restaurant,” a sign proclaimed. The inevitable creep of gentrification — the fliers for yoga and Pilates studios, the apartments renting for $2,200 a month, the Starbucks and wine bars — is notably not a part of “In the Heights,” whose characters are mostly strivers.

But then again, a lot of things are not a part of “In the Heights.”

“I think most people think of Washington Heights as the place where Jay-Z goes uptown to get his drugs processed in his songs,” Mr. Miranda said on his next stop, a private park behind a co-op complex where his girlfriend’s parents live. “That wasn’t my reality growing up.”

Looking out over the Hudson to the Palisades, he added: “Most people, when they think of Washington Heights, they don’t think of views like this. They don’t think of quiet. As someone who grew up with as much knowledge of Puerto Rico as I had of He-Man and She-Ra, my job was not to be pure, because I can’t get away with that.”

Following him through the neighborhood, it’s easy to see how Washington Heights sings: the Amtrak whistle as the train crosses the bridge, the “hey mami” talk of the waitresses at El Nuevo Caridad, the construction crews.

“My dream is to buy a place up here,” Mr. Miranda said. He can’t quite afford it, he said — “yet.”

Correction: March 17, 2008

An article in Weekend on Friday about Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the music for “In the Heights,” the new Broadway show in which he also stars, misstated the name of a street at the Washington Heights intersection where he once took piano lessons. It is Cabrini Boulevard, not Cabrini Avenue.